Where I’ve Been – We’ve Eloped! (+ Weekly Wrap)

Hello readers!

I’ve been gone for a couple weeks and I’m dreadfully late with reading everyone’s posts! As you can imagine, due to the pandemic a lot of things have been chaotic right now, and for the first time since this blog was created in 2017, I didn’t have the time/energy to post, nor anything scheduled for an entire week and half! Of course, my work schedule has been crazy and I’ve tried to focus lately on getting enough sleep and food and trying to de-stress as much as possible when I’m home. Which meant, for those few days, a break from blogging, too. Now I’m starting to get used to the new schedule and starting to run, read and blog again.

But on to the good news: I got married!

We eloped, basically. It was entirely unexpected (well, as far as it can be, considering I was engaged already), since we had a different date planned and my family was coming over from Brazil and we had a honeymoon planned, too. But things have been so uncertain right now that we just decided to do it as soon as possible, called in and got an appointment for two days later! It was a beautiful, sunny day, we picked up some cake afterwards and had champagne until everything we said was funny.

It was so lovely, and I’m so happy. So for the past few days I’ve been a little too distracted to post.

Dear readers, meet my husband, the sweet, lovely and witty blogger behind Clio’s Boardgames!

We wanted to get married in April. Due to the pandemic, we could not have guests and had to move the date – to today. It was a very beautiful day, though – just the two of us. #LoveInTheTimeOfCorona @natysbookshelf pic.twitter.com/vOx4K1HARv

— Clio's Board Games (@cliosboardgames) March 20, 2020

And here’s our kitty with the dress I wore:

Thanks! Look, here's Penelope next to the wedding dress! pic.twitter.com/MAuYpOVcG8

— Clio's Board Games (@cliosboardgames) March 20, 2020

It was of course not the civil wedding we had planned, but it was so beautiful I have no regrets. We picked up flowers and decorated the house, made our favorite dishes and got cat hair all over our wedding clothes. So lovely.

Weekly Wrap Up

Review: Actress, by Anne Enright

Rating: ★★★★☆

Categories: Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction

Goodreads

Actress is the story of Katherine O’Dell, a glamorous Irish actress who famously shot a man in the foot and was institutionalized for being mad, as told by her daughter Norah.

This was one of the books I was most excited for in the Women’s Prize for Fiction Longlist of this year! It has everything I love in fiction: glamour, secrets, gorgeous writing and an alluring, difficult main character. I loved Katherine O’Dell as a character so much, and spent the entire novel wishing the story was told from her perspective instead of Norah’s. I did not care much for Norah, nor understand why she addresses the book to her husband in “you” format. Having the point of view this way certainly added a certain mystery and glamour to Katherine, but would have enjoyed the book a lot more if it had been told in third person.

Review: Weather, by Jenny Offill

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Categories: Literary Fiction

Goodreads

In Weather, Lizzie is a librarian who is a fake shrink to her mother and to her brother, Henry, who is a recovering addict and whose wife is about to give birth to their first child. She starts assisting Sylvia, her old professor at University, answer emails for her podcast, which forces Lizzie to confront her own life and the situation of the world,

Weather was one of the books I was looking most forward to from the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020 Longlist, but in the end I was left wanting more from it. For starters, I struggled to write a paragraph about the book’s plot, because there isn’t actually much of it at all.

Weekly Wrap Up + Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020 Haul (W11/2020)

Hello readers!

I hope everyone is doing ok with the state of things these days. I am sorry for people staying home and feeling lonely, so maybe that’s a nice time for the bookish community to shine! If you feel lonely, reach out to other bloggers, most of us will be happy to make small talk and discuss books with others. Just because some of us can’t leave the house, doesn’t mean we can’t chat and stay social from our couches!

I bought a few books from the WP longlist, and they’re so beautiful! Those three are the ones where I was putting all my hopes of high start ratings, at least the time I purchased them (by now I’ve finished 1 and half of them, and I have Thoughts). Now that I’ve finished also Queenie and How We Disappeared, I actually am positively surprised that I’m enjoying the longlist so far! This sounds weird to say, but I have been seeing lots of negative reviews lately, so I’m just happy it’s a nice experience so far.

I am debating, however, dropping Girl by Edna O’Brien from my TBR. I’ve heard nothing but bad things about the book and I am not terribly fond of the idea of a white Irish woman writing the story of a girl from Nigeria being kidnapped by Boko Haram. I just… it doesn’t sit well with me. That, plus hearing that the book is not that great either, has made me wonder if I want to spend money and time on it. Do I stick to my plan to read the entire longlist or should I skip books I know I’ll actively hate?? Vote:

Do I remove Girl (from WP longlist) from my TBR?

I don't wanna read it + the reviews haven't been great

But

Then I don't complete the longlist read! I'll read 15/16 which… ugh.

What do you think?

— Naty's Bookshelf 👩‍💻📚 (@natysbookshelf) March 13, 2020

This week I bought:

Review: Queenie, by Candice Carty-Williams

Rating: ★★★★☆

Categories: Contemporary Fiction

Goodreads

When Tom says he needs a break and Queenie needs to move out, she tries to tell herself it’s not as bad as all that, she’ll live for a few months in a shared apartment and then go back to he relationship, even better than before. But as her break becomes messier and messier, Queenie’s mental health deteriorates and she makes increasingly worse choices.

Whew, this book knocked me out of the park and left me a mess. It starts off rather runny, I was snorting on my lunch break, but as Queenie starts to make terrible choices and act detached from her own life, my heart started to break. I think this book hit me hard because I went through a breakdown too, some years ago, and jeopardized a lot of things in the process, including not doing my job and ignoring my friends and family, detaching myself from my life – so as Queenie becomes more unlikable and makes worse choices that a person doing okay never could understand, I couldn’t help but sympathize. We did not go through the same things at all (I’m not a black woman, for starters, and had the support of my family and boyfriend), and my heart aches so much for all the horrors she had to go through.

Review: How We Disappeared, by Jing-Jing Lee

Rating: ★★★★☆

Categories: Historical Fiction, Contemporary Fiction

Goodreads

How We Disappeared tells the story of Wang Di, an old woman from Singapore who’s just lost her husband before she told him her story of the war and listened to his own. Trying to find out the truth is much harder now that the war is long over and so many people are dead or missing. Her own story hurts too much and she tries to not think about it if she can – she’s never told her husband she was a “comfort woman”. On the other side of the town, Kevin finds out his grandmother found his father when he was a baby and never gave him back to the biological father she later found out still lived.

Review: The Hour of the Star / A Hora da Estrela by Clarice Lispector, edition in Portuguese [EN/PT]

I haven’t done bilingual reviews in a while, but since I read this very popular Brazilian classic, I thought it would be worth the effort writing a double review. The Hour of the Star is one of the few translated books from Brazil that English-speakers have access to more or less easily, so I am reviewing here the edition I read in Portuguese. I’ve heard that the translated work isn’t very good, and I completely believe it – Clarice has a writing style that is probably really hard to translate in the first place. I would be curious to see how the translation was done, but honestly, I’ve had quite enough of this book and would prefer moving on to her other stories.

[English]

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

Categories: Literary Fiction, Classic Fiction

Goodreads

I recently re-read Felicidade Clandestina and was impressed by how much I loved Clarice Lispector’s short stories, so I might have come into The Hour of the Star with high expectations, but I was sorely disappointed. The Hour of the Star tells the story of Macabéa, a girl from Northeast Brazil who lives in poverty in Rio de Janeiro. The entire story is told by a male narrator that insists he is in love with Macabéa (although she’s fictional) and must tell her story; which is quite interesting, since he spends most of the book talking about himself instead. Macabéa, put into the background of her own story, is left with a collective of stereotypes and tragedy. She is the kind of character that is hard to root for, because we never really get to know her. After the entire book, I still felt like I barely knew her at all. In terms of literary accomplishment, this philosophical and introspective voice of the narrator is surely new, fresh and interesting, but it did not translate into a good book overall, for me.

Weekly Wrap Up + Starting with the Women’s Prize Longlist W10/2020

Hello readers!

The WP Longlist is OUT and I’m excited and nervous about it. I picked up a book that I think will be an underrated read, How We Disappeared by Jing-Jing Lee, but I’m moving so slowly with my reading these weeks that I am not sure how much I’ll be able to read before the shortlist is announced! I’d hope at least 8 books. I tried recruiting my mom to read the books and pretend I read them myself, but she sent me memes of dogs instead of answering, so I guess I have to read everything myself as usual.

This week I bought:

Weekly Wrap Up

A Hora da Estrela by Clarice Lispector / Goodreads 2 stars

Mini-Review: Snare by Lilja Sigurðardóttir

Rating: ★★★★☆

Categories: Noir Thriller, F/F, translated fiction

Goodreads

Snare is the story of Sonja, a mother who finds herself in a nasty divorce settlement after her husband catches her in bed with another woman. To be able to pay her lawyer’s fees, she starts to smuggle drugs into the country, and finds out she is actually very good at that. She needs only a few more jobs before she has enough money saved to try to get custody of her son again – if she can survive and escape the Snare.

I did not expect to like this as much as I did, in fact – I’ve picked up so many books that ended up disappointing lately and felt like a cold, noir mystery. The writing is spare and to the point, which I really enjoyed. This is the kind of noir that I think of when I want to read noir, and although I’d have preferred it to be a standalone, I think it’s very encouraging that the books are slim. I loved the complicated relationship between Agla and Sonja, and the complexity of the situations they found themselves in both by their own doing and  by circumstance – and the scheming of others. This is a quite intense read!

Thoughts on the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020 Longlist

Hello readers!

The longlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020 came out! (crowd cheers)

We're delighted to reveal this year's #WomensPrize longlist 🙌

Congratulations to our sixteen brilliant longlisted authors. Discover them here: https://t.co/6w8na8znoz pic.twitter.com/AgSYHAoQpL

— Women's Prize (@WomensPrize) March 3, 2020

My TBR cries as I add 13 books to it, but that’s okay because I’m pretty excited to read those. I am surprised that Ducks, Newburyport didn’t make it and honestly disappointed to not see it there. I’m less surprised that The Man Who Saw Everything and My Dark Vanessa didn’t make it either, but I really wish they had! The Testaments isn’t there either, which actually pleases me, as I really didn’t want to pick it up.

My thoughts on the books for this year: